


It Named Itself Color

by notoriousjae



Series: Marshfield Drabbles [6]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 11:16:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5664145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoriousjae/pseuds/notoriousjae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's an old legend of Arcadia Bay about a time where the world lacked color and an Angel was born with the purpose of restoring it. But every Angel needs a Mermaid. A marshfield mermaid fairytale AU. Part of a series of Marshfield prompts (ranging from cute to cuter) that turned into drabbles. (G for Jesus?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Named Itself Color

**Author's Note:**

> A bunch of people have sent in Marshfield drabbles to my [Tumblr](http://begonefoulsoftdrink.tumblr.com), so I figured I might as well post them here. Just because.
> 
> **Prompt:** "Can you make a Mermaid! AU for marshfield? If you have the time. :)"
> 
> Negl I really liked writing this. I always really like writing fairytales. Just 'cause.

****There’s a tale that’s often told to the young children of a small town settled by the coast whose sign is bright and tilted with stripped paint and skewed letters--the town of Arcadia Bay.

It’s a beautiful, quaint place, birds flying above brilliant blue oceans and sandy beaches, green grass hugging vibrant colored buildings and a tall, ever-bright lighthouse that shines across worlds with life.

But the town, according to legend, wasn’t always that way.

Hundreds of years ago, God had created Arcadia Bay to be his masterpiece, and it was. It was full of every kind of art that He had conceived--a bustling center of creativity and life and passion. It was full of people and laughter and color but with art comes temptation and with temptation comes greed. The more years that passed, the more greedy the people of the town became. At first they merely hoarded art in their homes, instead of spreading it into the world. Then, art became their currency, and they called it money. Money was shoved in their pockets until they turned their noses at the green grass in front of them for the green paper in their pocket, painted in precise lines with no flow. The town started to eat art like pigs and scoundrels. They started to devour color until their teeth were red and their eyes hollow, and as they diverted from the Ways, God diverted from them.

**“What of the life and the skies and the seas I’ve given you?** ” God asked the town, the ocean roaring and the children crying and the blue sky turning gray.

“ _It is not as beautiful as us._ ”

And thus God forsake them. God looked upon the town with displeasure and disappointment and took the life from it that He gave with abundance as penance. He took away his most precious gift: His art.

The color faded from the streets and the stream and soon everything in Arcadia Bay was black and white and gray, along with the dreary people in it.

“ **Let you see what colorless lives you’ve become, then**.” He said, and watched over them with sad eyes. This was the doctrine Arcadia Bay was raised in for hundreds of years--a simple truth: the town was to forsake art as they knew no color, no life, and it was said if they suffered enough, their blood might turn from gray to red and their eyes might turn from black to brown and blue and gray and green. It was said that if the people gave penance enough--were strict enough--were heartless enough, God might recognize their Sorrow and give them back their life--their color.

The blue ocean rolled in graphite that no longer dusted pages of white. The building’s bricks were stamped black in paint that no longer stained their windows. And their eyes--

Their eyes were never the same.

Until a century passed and an angel was given to the town, and thus the tale truly starts.

What was the name of it, you might ask? With most things full of change and truth, its name was simple:

**The tale of the Angel and the Mermaid.**

\--

On the Eve of Penance, the day when the town offered their palettes and brushes and crosses, a girl was born. It was not a rare occurrence for the birth to be successful, as the girl’s mother was round and full of food and life and worship, so certainly God might give them a girl to repent and all might be good. And all was good.

The mother named the girl Kate, but she was not Kate for long.

As it was said that Kate was God’s angel from the moment she was born for, the moment the young babe opened her eyes, emeralds of grass shone up at her parents. Her eyelashes fluttered and her cry was gentle and soothing, and her eyes were greener than life, itself. It was the first color the town had seen in lifetimes and the girl’s name Kate was replaced with a title, instead:

Angel.

For surely God had kissed the girl’s eyelids with green lips and the girl was Blessed.

But with many great, beautiful gifts, comes fear, too. The Angel was revered and feared and ostracized and worshiped. She heard snickers behind her back, as black and white and gray people are the cruelest, and when she sat for her lessons and her penance on her knees, no one ever sat with her. They called her pure like it was a curse, like it was as against God’s way as it _was_ His way, and she never knew what color her eyes were, but the beautiful Angel knew her heart raged like the torn, angry waves of the ocean against Arcadia’s shores.

She would pray often that God might deliver her, but the world was still colorless. The people of Arcadia Bay, you see, saw one color--they saw green eyes and a timid, thin smile--but the Angel saw no color, at all, because she could never see herself.

She would look at oceans and see gray, never knowing what lay beneath.

For years she grew and grew until she was a woman, not a girl, and the priests of the town insisted she keep her chest close with restricting garbs and pin her hair with needles so that it might not fly in the wind and that she be all of the Way for all of them. That she might lead them as she was their Angel. They insisted she keep God close to her chest and repent all she’d done, but the Angel had never understood, because she had never done anything but be Born from Him.

They did not have Art, but they expected her to bring it to them in shades of gray. They gave her their forbidden paints but she could not see the colors, so she did not paint. They gave her food, but no spices save for salt, thick and heavy, as they had sold all of their spices hundreds of years ago. They gave her instruments, but no sheet music...but this Art. This Art, the angel learned on her own.

She would carry a violin at her side and learned how to trim horse hair with white teeth and run her nails along the edge of it like a siren and perhaps the violin is the closest to God as its screeching notes go the highest when a child plays it.

So all the Angel had to her name was a title and no name and paints and food and a violin when it was all too much. Because to be alone is a horrid thing. She was sad of it, sad of all of it, and it was all so gray and lonely when she found herself by the edge of the ocean. The lighthouse shone above her, pointing somewhere in the sea, but the Angel could not see that far, all she could see were her white shoes and the black sky and the half white moon and the gray ocean.

There was a storm the day when the Angel was sad enough to end her life, to pay the ultimate penance to Him for she had been born wrong, with only one color, and the ocean was sick of it. It rattled against the shores like a rabid dog in a cage, foaming gray at the mouth, and the Angel cried in the rain as she tossed her violin into the ocean.

And it’s said that Art is the strongest of bridges, for a mermaid could not hear anything above the water save for the storm (a mermaid, tales say, could not hear anything underneath the water save music, at all) but she heard the siren’s call of a violin fall into the water. It’s said that the moment the Angel’s violin fell into the water, that it called out to a mermaid like a sonata, softer than the raging ocean, and when the angel threw herself into its endless depths, the mermaid wasn’t drawn just to the violin but to her.

The ocean raged all around them as the mermaid wrapped arms around the angel’s waist and brought her to shore, panting above the water as she was so little used to air and the angel panting because she was so unused to sea.

A mermaid, unknown to gray shores, saved the angel’s life.

Even angels, after all, need mermaids, for their wings can’t help them swim, only sink.

What greeted the angel was a sight that most surprised her, wet and dizzy from the water and salt on her tongue, blinking to see dark hair and gray eyes and a dripping face hovering above her. The mermaid was beautiful and concerned and quiet and gingerly setting a wet violin, wood soaking up rain, next to a quivering shoulder on the beach.

They had trailed up to the edge of the water, fingers skimming along the surface, white cascades of life trailing from fingertips like the high-end notes of a violin as the mermaid curiously searched her features like she had never seen an angel, before.

“Are you alright?” The mermaid had asked, nearly hesitant--like her voice might not be heard at all--and the Angel gasped until all of the water was gone and nodded.

“I am quite. You’ve saved my life, mermaid.” And this was the start of their first conversation--one of many--as the mermaid held the girl up against the shore to warm her as the storm slowly died down. It wasn’t until it had passed that the mermaid went to leave and a girl’s fingers wrapped around her shoulder. “Wait, dear mermaid, I...I have nothing to give you my thanks. It was a weak moment that I, ashamed, might have thought to end my life, and I--”

“You needn’t thank me for saving your life.” And there was a smile from the mermaid, then, quiet and perhaps oddly settling. “I had never heard such beautiful music, before, than from that...what do you call it?”

“What? This? My Violin? But I hadn’t played it--”

“Mermaids can hear more than just instruments, but hearts, too. Your heart was tied to it. We can only hear music in the ocean, for the seas are so loud, and I had longed to hear it, you see. I’ve never heard anything until I heard your voice and your vio...lin? I had only read it in books, I think, but seeing is so different than hearing and it was beautiful.”

“Oh.” It was the first time anyone had paid the Angel a compliment and she wasn’t even sure what it was for. “There must be something I can do to repay you for my life.” She continued, fingers curving around that shoulder.

The mermaid looked thoughtful for a moment, and then almost shy.

“Might you play it for me, again? The vio...lin?”

And thus the angel did.

She would sneak away from after penance every night underneath the white moon and the black sky and the gray waves and play the violin in front of the mermaid, watching her lean up against the nearby boulder and listen, eyes awed and quiet. Sometimes, the mermaid would hum along with her and, once, the mermaid fell asleep against the rock and the angel had to wake her so that she wouldn’t drown in the air.

They went like this for months until the mermaid asked the Angel a question before she lifted her bow to the strings.

“What’s your name?”

It was something she had never been asked, before, for everyone in town had known her since she was born--had known of her eyes more than her--and she hadn’t had a name since an hour after she breathed.

“They call me the Angel.”

“Odd name.” The mermaid noted, so casually and calm, hands restlessly drumming along the rock like she was full of life. Odd, perhaps, for a creature with no legs, but the angel also knew nothing of swimming, as she had never done it, before, in her life.

Though she had come quite close to drowning, once.

“It isn’t my name, but my title. It’s what they expect of me, dear mermaid.” The angel had informed her.

“What they expect of you?” The mermaid looked quite curiously at her, like perhaps she knew something of responsibility. The ocean’s tides, after all, didn’t rustle themselves and the mermaid had carried oceans on her back. But, still, she had looked at the Angel like she was something more--something more than just a herald of God--she looked at her like she was human and, thus, art in itself. “Then shouldn’t they have named you ‘friend’?”

“Friend?” The girl repeated, seemingly stunned, as no one had called her such, before. Not without fearful eyes or dull repetitions.

“Of course, as I can’t imagine you as anything else, as that’s your name to me.”

“Friend.” The Angel repeated with a faint smile.

“But it’s still not much of a name. Why, if someone shouted ‘friend’ at both of us, we might both turn around and I would flop on the beach and you might look as you do, now.” The mermaid joked--the Angel had discovered the mermaid to have quite the sense of humor--and the girl laughed, hand raising up to cover it, water sloshing about the mermaid’s shoulders as her tail kicked.

“I was never told mermaids were quite so silly.”

But the angel’s eyes were fond and perhaps she had fallen a little in love with her, underneath the warmth of the water in her lungs. Perhaps she had fallen in love with her as the violin broke the ocean’s tides, as was the way of God and Art--to fall in love with the unknown and the most precious known to us.

“You were never told of mermaids, at all, save to fear us.” A near shrug of a gesture accompanied the peculiar mermaid’s mention and the Angel leaned closer to her. The mermaid’s voice was as soft as the ocean itself as she asked, “What would you like to be named by me, then?”

“Other than ‘friend’?” The girl--not angel, in this moment--asked.

“Other than friend.”

There was a long moment of silence in which the Angel chose a name for herself, hazel eyes glinting in sunlight she couldn’t see, leaning back into the cool familiarity of the water.

“Kate. My mother occasionally calls me Kate, as she wished to name me. I...I would very much like to be named that, I think.” The Angel--Kate--decided.

“Kate.” The mermaid repeated, tasting it on her tongue like salt and life and paint she’d never seen, sweet and thick and fitting. “I like it.”

“And you, my dear mermaid?” Kate rolled over onto her side, hand tenting up in prayer underneath her ear, searching the mermaid’s close eyes.

“The sea--the waves--they all call me Maxine. But...perhaps I would like if you named me something unique. Something different than that.”

“Max, then.” Kate decided, as well, like she was the decider of great things, and to the mermaid (more important than the town) she was, “Never Maxine, not to me.”

“Max.” The girl repeated. “Max, Kate’s friend.”  

And thus the Angel and the Mermaid were named by each other and came to be friends.

And thus every night, Kate crept to the beach until she was more of a woman than an angel and sick of the burden on her shoulders.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in with the rest of the world. Like, I’m...alone.” The tears would clog emerald eyes and a gray throat and the mermaid was always right next to her, listening, as was the case with precious things and even more precious people.

The mermaid leaned closer, fingers wet as they cupped her friend’s cheeks.

“Oh, mermaid.” The girl’s fingers curled in her dress so that they might not drop her violin in the ocean for the second time and call another mermaid, as this mermaid was the only one she wanted. “Oh, My _Max_. I wish to paint you, but I don’t know what color is.” Her voice cracked and snapped like a twig might underneath her shoe and the mermaid looked quite sad of it, as perhaps Kate had wished to paint, but Max had never seen a branch before. “I am told my eyes are green, but I’ve never seen it. I look in the ocean and all I see is gray and...and _me_ , which is this gray mess of it, and I’ve lead my people astray!” She bemoaned and the mermaid pulled herself further up the rock.

“But how might you forsake people for a color you don’t know?” The mermaid curiously asked, chin dipped up like a learning, small child. “It seems quite odd to me.”

“They are my people.”

“They are people.” Max agreed, but continued, as mermaids who see color in gray oft do, “It’s odd to me to see you and not know what gray is, but that you see me and don’t know what color is. We see in two different worlds, Kate.” The mermaid shook water along with her head, “Your eyes are a beautiful green. Like seaweed and the brush in the ocean, but I am curious what mine might be. I’ve never seen my reflection--never seen this mirror you speak of. But when I look at you, I see the color of your eyes and am reminded that mine might not matter.”

Kate paused on the ocean, looking up from the boulder to gray.

“Perhaps one day you might see color, but you see gray and forget that it is a color, itself. Gray is as much a color as green.”

“Are all mermaids so wise, dear Max?” The angel asked, still so sad and heavy. They don’t talk for a longer time, yet, as Kate looked from her violin down to the waves.

“That day...you didn’t fall into the ocean, did you?” The mermaid asked, but there was nothing but gray in her eyes and if Kate ducked her head in shame, her friend didn’t comment on it. All the mermaid did was tuck up her chin and the angel’s nose turned to press itself into a wet palm like all girls into their rocks, glad as she was for the excuse to hide her tears, because surely the mermaid wouldn’t notice a little speck of water when she lived in it.

Unfortunately for the angel, the mermaid was astute, and before the prophet knew what was happening, the mermaid was wrapping a hand around the back of her neck and tugging her into the ocean along with her. Tears didn’t matter as much in the ocean, after all, and when Kate broke the surface of the water, eyes opening in surprise, the mermaid’s fingers tangled with hers, tugging the girl further and further down until she was wrapped in her arms, both of them suspended in water.

Perhaps she had the urge to gasp, but fortunately thought better of the need for air.

“Open your eyes, Kate.” The mermaid implored in her ear, “There is no gray in the ocean.”

Trusting the mermaid, Kate opened her eyes.

And thus the Angel Kate saw God in the seas. Water surrounded them in pastel waves of brushes-- green and blue and turquoise, in between. She saw coral living and curling against steel rocks and red fish and green fish and purple and yellow and blue. She didn’t have names for any of them, but art needn’t always a name, and thus her heart named all of them colors like she’d named Max.

“You’ll drown down here, Kate.” Max warned her before leaning forward and kissing her, sharing the air of her lungs and the color of her lips before she carried her back up to the beach, color fading to gray around them.

Until the angel looked up and felt her world shift, the mermaid looking back at her.

Stunned. For she didn’t see all the colors in the world, she only saw one.

“Your eyes, you’d said. What color were they?”

“I don’t know.” Max reminded her, gray body surrounded by the endless blue of the ocean and the sky, wrapping the world of gray in its blanket of life. Only Kate hadn’t a word for it, yet, so she only called it Max.

She called the ocean Max and the sky Max and the color of Max’s eyes _Max._

Kate was taken by the beauty of it.

“What color is the ocean?” Kate cupped the mermaid’s cheeks and brought her closer, a laugh bubbling in her throat that made the mermaid quite confused, indeed.

“We call it blue.” Max told her and Kate bounced with her laughter until the mermaid sloshed in the water, too, from the motion of it, arms coming up to curve around white shoulders.

“Your eyes are blue. Like the sky and the ocean and the world you’re surrounded in every day, my dear mermaid.” Kate offered because Max had said she’d wished to know.

“Blue?” The mermaid repeated, blinking. “My eyes are blue?”

“Blue.” Kate practically beamed and the mermaid had never seen something so beautiful, and that was funny, truly, that love wasn’t constrained to color and art, but to the way lips tucked or spread or furled.

“And your eyes are green.” Max continued, excitement entering her voice, “Can you see that, as well?”

“Oh, Max, it doesn’t matter what color my eyes are, as I can see yours. I can see the sky and the ocean and _you_ , and perhaps you were right, and that’s the folly of it all--that I was so burdened with knowing myself, at all!”

The angel danced and laughed and tackled the mermaid into the ocean until it rained and she saw the color of that, too.

And thus the Angel began to dig through the forbidden paints that were gifted her until she found the only color she saw and named it Max and began to paint sunsets of blue until her fingers were stained with ocean and her cheeks were smeared with sky.

“Art.” She called it, again, and God smiled.

She painted and painted and painted until the whole house was full of blue and her mother sobbed and her father laughed at all of the gray and slowly she understood, and perhaps the mermaid understood, too.

For love is the greatest art of all. And in it she saw color. 

She painted until all of the colors unraveled from blue, light shining through the windows. She saw the grass and the sun and the sky. She saw the way her sister’s cheeks flushed with red and her mother’s eyes danced with green--like her own, she understood--and how her father’s with brown. She saw dusty yellow, brown hair in front of her own eyes and the pink of her nails. She saw the dark shadows of wrinkled flesh in her knuckles and the blue tail of a bird. She saw the white of the lighthouse and the red of its trim--the brown of its door--and the yellow of the beach as she ran towards it.

She saw all of these colors and named them _Max._

“Angel!” The town called as she ran towards the water and the mermaid stumbled on fins to catch her. “Angel!” The town called as she kissed the mermaid again and again and again, for she saw color.

As the angel finally understood what the town never had--what the town had forsaken for years-- _Love_.

“Max!” Kate called, exuberant and full of life and no longer an Angel, but a girl. “Max, I can see! I can see you! I can see the world and paint it with my fingers and my brushes and--”

“You can paint it? Oh, Kate, I knew you would!” Max’s excited, proud voice twined with hers across the white beach.

The world bloomed in color and spirals of life as God saw the mermaid and the Angel and gave them the gift of it, fins turning to legs that stumbled on dusty beaches as Kate wrapped her in her arms, both of their chests bubbling with laughter.

“I wish to paint it with you. Oh, I must paint it with you. Come--come with me, I understand it all, now, for it’s not an end. It’s not an end, at all, all of this color, but a bright, beautiful beginning.”

And thus the Angel tugged the Mermaid back into the ocean on both of their legs and both of them understood what the town hadn’t, their hands twining under white crests of waves and rumbling waves of laughter, clothes soaking to the bone, brown and blonde and green and blue and red lips and white teeth and pale skin.

And laughter, which is the loveliest shade of all.

_The town watched a mix of color disappear into the sea, never to retur--_

“--What?!” A young voice booms from underneath the covers, “What the hell?”

“ _\--n._ ” A much older laugh grumbles and chuckles and spreads smiles on lips, pausing from the text to look down at a small form huddled underneath way too many blankets. The sound of rain pattering against the window pane is familiar and a pretty good backdrop for the old story (a slightly-worn book from use) and it must’ve been a while since she’s told the kid this because she read it to him a good thousand times when he was younger.

“The town watched a mix of color disappear into the sea, never to return.” She repeats, smirk only spreading.

“So...so that’s just...it?! They run off into the ocean and--and that doesn’t even make sense. Max isn’t a mermaid anymore so, like, neither one of them would be able to breathe and--”

“Sometimes fairytales don’t make sense, kid. It’s all just metaphor, anyways.”

“I don’t care what’s metaford. What happened to Kate and Max? So...she left the town in all black and white? They went into the ocean and...and died and no one in the town ever--”

“Mike.” She cuts the young boy off, setting down the book, because she memorized it a while back. Not that she’d admit it. “You don’t have to die to remember someone. And the town always remembered her.”

“Why?”

“Because the moment the angel touched the mermaid, the world changed. It shifted. It became something beautiful, again.”

“It did?”

“You never let me finish the book.” She notes and young Michael’s cheeks blush in a familiar enough way that she’s not about to tease him. Cute little damn kid. “It’s said,” She starts, “That when you meet someone very, very important, that there’s a ripple, like the angel throwing her violin into the sea and the mermaid hearing its music like a siren. The world moves--it changes--and the ripples spread outwards and outwards until they become tides and tides become waves and waves--”

“Become tsunamis?” The boy pipes up from the bed, beaming.

“Become tsunamis and tornadoes and--”

“Woah! I’ve never seen a tornado.”

Yeah. Thank God for that. “You haven’t seen a tsunami, either, kiddo.”

“Oh. Right.” He looks sheepish and that’s familiar, too, so she just leans forward and ruffles dark hair, continuing.

“The smallest change can affect the whole world, but it starts with that first moment. When you meet someone that’s destined to change you, the world around you changes, too. The whole town had been cursed to see in black and white, but the moment the angel touched the mermaid...those ripples started. They rolled over the whole town in small waves, taking over the beach, growing and growing and growing so large until there was a wave. A large wave from where the mermaid and the angel left--larger than any the town had ever seen. It stood taller than the lighthouse ever had, and when it hit the town...” Her smile spreads.

Michael sits up on the edge of the bed, covers bunching by his curling fingers.

“It washed away all the gray. It wasn’t that the world was cursed to be colorless, God wasn’t cruel, but that people made it gray, themselves. They covered it with gray and harsh black and when the wave came, it spilled life and color all along the buildings because the color had been there all along. It washed away years of hate and anger and sadness and self loathing. The sun no longer hit gray peaks and rusted sheathes, but bright red brick--yellow trim--and everyone rushed out into dusty brown streets to curl fingers into green grass and gasp at the bright sun and the blue sky and the _ocean_. Everyone in the town ran out into the beach, kicking off their shoes and tossing off their clothes--”

“They were naked?” He gasps, a little like his mother, and she leans forward to tickle his sides.

“--like hooligans!”

The boy laughs and laughs and laughs and bats away her hands.

“And they didn’t just feel the water for the first time in years, they _saw_ it. And it was all because one little mermaid swam up to the top of the ocean and one little angel fell in love with her. Crazy, huh?”

“Yuh huh.”

“So it’s not sad, kid. Maybe the town never saw the girl, again, but she was somewhere happier--she was somewhere loved--and all of their lives were changed because of it. All of their lives had color, again. Because, one person--” She pokes his stomach, “Can change the world, if they want to. Because God, as the legend goes, loved all the people so much that He wanted them to love themselves, too.”

She thought it was a load of crap--or she used to--but she always quietly loved that part of the book the most.

“Wow.”

“Yeah. So anytime you think about being alone or scared or unimportant, just remember how Kate felt on that beach, and how--”

“How her and the mermaid are happy, somewhere?”

“Yeah, Michael. That.”

The kid beams so wide it’s bound to split his face in two.

“So you feel alright to go to sleep?” She finally asks, ruffling his hair. He tucks into the covers and nods eagerly, probably awaiting tales of mermaids and angels to greet him in his sleep. She grabs the cap he’d grabbed from her to get her to stick around and tell him a story (though she would’ve done it anyways, duh) from the corner and shoves it back onto her head.

“Aunt Chloe?” He asks from the bed, sleepily smacking his jaws like a horse with peanut butter on its lips.

“Yeah, squirt?”

“You make me see color. And not just ‘cause of your hair.”

Fucking kids. Chloe blinks away moisture from her eyes, smiling as she leans down to kiss his forehead like a sap, “You too, Mikey. Go to sleep before your moms kill me.” A few seconds later, she’s making her way out into the hallway, only to be greeted by the sight of familiar green eyes and a kind smile, arms crossed as the smaller woman leans against the wall.

Chloe shoves her hands into her pockets.

“You’re still telling that story?”

“Why not?” Chloe asks, tugging out her cigarettes--only to be smoked outside unless she gets a halfhearted chide and an impressive puppy dog glare--and plucking one out, pushing it behind her ear. “You wrote it, _mermaid_.”

Kate’s eyes crinkle a little at the edges, leaning forward to grab the cigarette from behind Chloe’s ear, pocketing it to a very annoyed look. “Not with those names, I didn’t.”

She so did. Both of them know it.

Kate smiles.

“And no smoking in the house.”

“God, why do I even come over here?” Chloe groans, trailing behind her to a way-too domestic Max doing dishes while whistling, earbuds shoved in, watching the way the brunette lifts her hand without even having to look (super fucking Max), and the telekinetic--or pathic or whatever tele-phone thing it is--conversation that happens without eye contact as Kate drops the cigarette in an open palm.

Max tries to toss it in the trashcan and fails miserably, Kate laughing as she wraps an arm around her waist and helps her do the dishes. While Chloe leans against the wall, arms crossed, and watches. Watches the way Kate hums along with her and how they both dance, a little, and how neither one of them own many dishes but they’re both so happy and their house is so full of pictures and paintings and color that Chloe loved that story for a reason.

Because there’s more to it, tucked away, that the kid never heard. That the world never heard.

Legend goes that the girl didn’t join the mermaid in the lake. She didn’t drown. The mermaid loved the angel so much that she learned how to walk with stick legs and grow a disturbingly disgusting fucking love of hipster music and they settled down an hour out of Portland with the mermaid’s best friend and a little rugged thing that got adopted when he was two. Chloe was never clear on the whole ‘how they got out of the ocean’ part, but she’s pretty sure God could teleport if Kate believed in it enough, and it’s good enough for her.

“Come on, Chloe,” Kate urges, Max turning around to wink at her, nodding not so clandestinely towards the cigarette on the floor for the blonde to grab it before Kate notices. Kate, who notices Max, playfully smacks her wrist--only for Max to smack her forearm and Kate to slap her stomach, again--while she laughs and tries to continue:  “You should stay for dinner.”

Chloe leans off and heads towards the two, shaking her head.

Because if Arcadia Bay wasn’t enough, they had to paint the _world_ with color, too.

\--

**And thus the world saw color, and the sky saw color, and the oceans saw color and Max named it Kate and Kate named it Max as they had both named each other and the world around them.**

**And God smiled, and named it Love.**


End file.
